“The FBI has misused a powerful digital surveillance tool more than 278,000 times, including against crime victims, Jan. 6 riot suspects, people arrested at protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 and — in one case — 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate, according to a newly unsealed court document.”

“The FBI says it has already fixed the problems, which it blamed on a misunderstanding between its employees and Justice Department lawyers about how to properly use a vast database named for the legal statute that created it, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).”

“But the failures to use the Section 702 database correctly when collecting information about U.S. citizens and others may make it harder for the agency to marshal support in Congress to renew the law, which is due to expire at the end of this year. “

Full article@ Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/05/19/fbi-digital-surveillance-misuse-jan6-blm/

 GOP politicians often pay lip service to the principles of limited government, they usually increase spending even faster than Democrats.

Indeed, Republicans are even worse than Democrats when measuring the growth of domestic spending!

This is bad news because it means the burden of government expands when Republicans are in charge.

And, as Gary Abernathy points out in a column for the Washington Post, Republicans then don’t have the moral authority to complain when Democrats engage in spending binges.

President Biden is proposing another $3 trillion in spending… There are objections, but none that can be taken seriously. …Republicans had lost their standing as the party of fiscal responsibility when most of them succumbed to the political virus of covid fever and rubber-stamped around $4 trillion in “covid relief,”… With Trump out and Biden in, Republicans suddenly pretended that their 2020 spending spree happened in some alternate universe. But the GOP’s united opposition to Biden’s $1.9 trillion package won’t wash off the stench of the hypocrisy. …I noted a year ago that we had crossed the Rubicon, that our longtime flirtation with socialism had become a permanent relationship. Congratulations, Bernie Sanders. The GOP won’t become irrelevant because of its association with Trump, as some predict. It will diminish because it is bizarrely opposing now that which it helped make palatable just last year. Fiscal responsibility is dead, and Republicans helped bury it. Put the shovels away, there’s no digging it up now.

For what it’s worth, I hope genuine fiscal responsibility isn’t dead.

Full Post by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2021/03/29/big-government-republicans-enable-big-government-democrats/?utm_source=feedotorg&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fee_partners

U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D–Ore.) has decided to close out the year by introducing the most unobjectionable piece of legislation ever conceived.

Called the Kittens In Traumatic Testing Ends Now Act, or KITTEN Act, Merkley’s bill—introduced last week—aims to stop the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) current practice of killing off cats they breed for research, requiring instead that these kitties be put up for adoption.

“The KITTEN Act will protect these innocent animals from being needlessly euthanized in government testing, and make sure that they can be adopted by loving families instead,” Merkley said in a statement.

The bill is a response to revelations from the White Coat Waste Project, an anti-animal testing group, about the USDA’s practice of essentially using kittens as parasite incubators at its Animal Parasitic Diseases Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland.

Carlin Becker described the grizzly practice for Reason in September:

“Documents obtained by the [White Coat Waste Project] show the department has been breeding around 100 kittens a year for almost 50 years just to infect them with a parasite that can cause toxoplasmosis, a disease that can lead to miscarriages and birth defects in humans and is a leading cause of death from foodborne illness. The department collects the kittens’ feces for two to three weeks and then simply euthanizes them with a shot of ketamine to the heart.”

This is a pretty shocking practice, considering the undeniable cuteness of the average kitten. It’s made worse by the fact that euthanizing the cats is almost certainly unnecessary.

According to the Center for Disease Control, the toxoplasma found in the research kitties’ poop only poses a risk to humans for up to three weeks after the animal is first infected. The parasite is easily treated in both humans and cats, and most people who become infected with toxoplasma do not even require treatment.

Nevertheless, the USDA has continued to defend the practice, arguing that it’s just following orders best practices in animal research, and that the risks to adoptive families are just too great to let these cats live.

“Our goal is to reduce the spread of toxoplasmosis. Adopting laboratory cats could, unfortunately, undermine that goal, potentially causing severe infections, especially with unborn children or those with immunodeficiencies,” a USDA spokesperson said to CNN back in May.

All things considered, this is a remarkable testament to a bureaucracy’s habit of just continuing to do the same thing it’s always done regardless of how cruel or unnecessary it might be. Indeed, it’s hard to think of anyone that could be opposed to ending needless, government euthanasia of potential fur babies.

No action has been taken on Merkley’s bill, as the text of his legilsation has not been released. A companion House bill—which would prohibit any “painful or stressful” USDA experimentation on cats—was introduced back in May, but has languished in committee for months.

Even in these divided times, one would hope that Americans could at least rally around the cause of saving a few cute kittens from needless, taxpayer-funded annihilation.

Source: http://reason.com/blog/2018/12/28/bill-to-end-unnecessary-federally-funded

On the heels of an unpaid-for $1.3 trillion spending binge, House Republicans have announced they plan to—I’m not making this up—push for a balanced budget amendment (BBA) when they return from recess. This only proves there is no low to which the GOP will not stoop as it continues to insult the intelligence of its voter base.

The real strategy to pass a BBA, as happened with Obamacare, will most likely be to hold empty, meaningless roll call votes on measures that have no hope of passing and which the GOP has no plan to carry out. Then a Republican lawmaker can tell voters in the fall: “Look, we tried to do something about federal spending, but the Democrats voted against the balanced budget amendment.”

Here’s why the GOP’s move to prioritize BBAs should be perceived as the duplicitous pandering and vacuous virtue signaling that it is: first, there’s the timing. This gesture comes just after lawmakers from both parties passed a broad, two-year budget framework that blows up the budget caps imposed in 2011, and will lead to trillions in spending each and every year henceforth, with interest payments on the massive federal debt set to outpace the cost of the military and the cost of Medicaid in just eight years. Voting for gargantuan spending of this size and then claiming to support a balanced budget amendment is like gorging on a sumptuous feast while insisting that you want a svelte physique.

The other reason voters should not take the Republican call for a BBA seriously is that even in the best of times it is almost impossible to pass an amendment to the Constitution. A balanced-budget amendment would require the support of two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate, in addition to the backing of three quarters of the states. That’s an almost impossible lift, which is why only 27 amendments to the Constitution have ever been ratified.

Nevertheless, calls for BBAs have been popular since the 1980s, and gained particular steam from conservatives in 2010 with the Tea Party movement. The idea sounds deceptively simple: a balanced budget amendment would require that the government spend no more than it takes in during any given year.

But even if by some miracle one was ratified, a balanced budget amendment is a blunt instrument that wouldn’t necessarily be effective. That’s because during recessions and economic downturns, the government has to spend more on things like nutritional assistance and unemployment benefits. With a BBA in place, Congress would be unable to do so, resulting in something like sequestration on steroids.

Full column by Barbara Boland @ The American Conservative http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-gops-laughable-call-for-a-balanced-budget-amendment/

Carly Fiorina proved at least one thing last week. Namely, you don’t have to be a career GOP politician to come across as a war-mongering neocon and abortion-bashing statist demagogue. She took the stage fully formed as a frightul modern-day Torquemada, threatening to bring fire and brimstone down on anyone running afoul of her righteous indignation and crystal clear grasp of the Truth.

That included about everyone on the world stage, save for the presumably sainted Bibi Netanyahu. As for the others, Putin was to be given the silent treatment and a stiff dose of NATO encirclement, while Iran was to be occupied by US inspectors at “every military and every nuclear facility…….. anytime, anywhere……”

Full expose by David Stockman @ http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/clueless-carly-crony-capitalist-war-monger-with-flash-cards/?utm_source=wysija&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mailing+List+AM+Wednesday